Creation Sharing Oberwesterwaldbahn: Route In Progress

I'm planning on starting my own route once university lightens, and this is perhaps the scariest part for me; I'm alrady expecting it to take months and I know that it is definitely going to ballon rapidly once I start actually working. Seeing you, and others, keep up the work in the face of adversity gives me hope I might be able to follow suit, however.

 

Not a great video, but I think here you can see a bit of the route from Au (Sieg) to Altenkirchen. Better than nothing?


Also at the end of this video you can at least see a bit from Au (Sieg):


And finally this one - in case you don't know it already - is the best one i've found:

 

Thank you for your continued support, Matin.

Yes, they are better than nothing. And yes, the cab rides of the Lahntalbahn and Sieg Railway available on YouTube are the ones, which can show me the start and end points pretty well.

The last video is the one which helped me the most with the scenery until I got the contact with Maik and Benedikt. Benedikt actually provided me the same for the passenger view from the other (right) side of the vehicle from Limburg to Frickhofen. Maik provided a passenger view video of Nistertal/Bad Marienberg and some other places around Nistertal.

For building the nearby scenery these passenger perspective videos are even better and more useful, because the vision is towards the side and so the scenery around is a bit more focused than the actual trackside.

The problem with these though is that the position and indication/numbering of the objects very close to the tracks, but relevant for the driver like the hectometer boards, level crossing announcers/HETs, smaller signs etc. are barely or not visible from these since I have no other source of information to obtain the data for them, I would need to place and guess them to my own assumption.

A problematic thing for routes running through a lot of forests is when trees or their shadows make the ground and the trackside at the bottom completely dark so that I have not even the help from Google Maps on these sections anymore.

When having a cab ride, the video is focused on the direction of travel and provides a clear view on the relevant objects for the driver as well as the Bü sensors and PZB magnets. But even on some cab rides I watched for other routes, the vision sometimes couldn't be clear enough because of the video quality or the speed of the loco.

Another thing is I still miss the right perspective from Frickhofen to at least Westerburg and the left perspective further up from Westerburg to anywhere else further up along the railway, so for only a relatively small section I have the passenger videos available and for all the other sections my reference still is Google Maps only, which is not that reliable.

I mean, Would it be okay to just go by a rough assumption and estimated values? Maybe. But what if an a few years, there will be a cab ride available and the virtual replication looks way different to the original? I could rechange it again yes, but I think its better just doing it correctly from the start I think.

Therefore I went on research to find a way I can get one in the last months.

It's not the end of the world though, and I can proceed without one, yes.

I just said it here, so anyone who potentially knows or is actually a person working for the railyway or any private operator, can get in contact with me here.

I also wouldn't want anyone else except me to worry about this problem actually. It's just because its pretty the last resort I could do to get one cab ride still, to replicate the scenery as best as possible.

 

This might be a bit out of scope but, are there any services on the line that aren't run by a DMU and don't have a cabcar? In that case, you could maybe get one of these sticky phone cases (or camera mounts), put in on the back window (rear door of the last coach) and record for the 2 hour run. However that's an in-person data gathering. which isn't something many people want to bother with.

Some people were recording IC routes like that (and sadly also reversing the footage).

Also for PZB magnets, you should just need a good Orthophoto (try looking through open data) and then you can measure it from something that is easy to spot on Google Earth. For signals that don't give a nice shadow though, I don't know.

 

No, unfortunately all services are run by DMUs (was ever so).

Next year this will change, when battery electric locos of type Siemens Mireo B will be used, but I don't think that makes a big difference for what we want.

There is a special railtour service without a cab car though some times at least once in summer, however unfortunatly it has a wagon attached on the end as I can see here, so the vision is limited backwards.

Funny thing is while you suggesting this, a person got in contact with me this summer, who wanted to do a trip to the railway and do that; placing a camera with a tripod and capture the drive backwards through the door of the rear cabin. I was a bit skeptical whether this would really capture the outside (which I need) and rather capture the cabin for the most part.

I also didn't want to make them feel uncomfortable doing this for me, as they came a bit far off. But I said while they're there and planned the trip anyways, he maybe could ask if he gets me a contact to the driver.

As a payout, I would help and create a route for them, which was what they wanted.

However, this weird plan did not got fulfilled.

So I had a look on the DOPs (20cm res) in OpenData and compared it with Google Maps.

It appears that on the orthophotos, the shadows of the trees are a bit lighter but the image is more blurry than the Google Maps one.

Probably due to the difference in time of day, season and the year of both captures, the shadows got cast a bit different as well.

However, in both, the shadows hide the tracks. The only reference that a track/route exist there is the furrow in the forest. In cases like that I can't even see the shadows of signals, let alone any smaller sign or sensor at the bottom.

DOP 20cm OpenData


Google Maps/Earth

 

moinsen, gibts denn wieder ein Update mit Bildern zu dieser schönen strecke die sie in Letzter zeit am Entwickeln sind